Neo-Nazis Awash in Sex Scandals

Despite all their pious rhetoric about defending the virtue of women, American white supremacists have always been particularly wont to sexually scandalous behavior. Nineteenth-century Klansmen were often rapists, and the Klan of the 1920s collapsed in the wake of its powerful Indiana leader's conviction for a rape so bestial that his victim died. More recently, the deputy of former Klan leader David Duke, Bruce Alan Breeding, left the movement after he was exposed for running a secret porn empire. And the National Alliance, long the most important neo-Nazi group in America, has shrunk to a discredited shadow of its former self, in part because of its leaders' taste for strippers and all-nude lap dancing.

So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to find that the heat goes on. Even so, the latest round of scandals has set neo-Nazis' tongues wagging nationwide.

In November, Martin Linstedt, a vitriolic racist who was for years a "pastor" of the neo-Nazi Church of the Sons of YHVH, was committed to a Missouri mental hospital while awaiting trial for allegedly kissing a young family member on the child's back, buttocks and groin. Three months earlier, church leader Morris Gulett ejected Linstedt for suggesting the "gang rape of female whigger [a white "nigger"] herd animals" and the "skinning alive of prisoners and execution by slow torture." Gulett, an ex-felon now in federal custody awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bank robbery, said Linstedt had made his group look like "street thugs."

In October, Steven Holten, the self-described Nevada leader of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, was arrested after allegedly soliciting a male undercover officer in Sparks, Nev., for sex. Police said Holten, who was in full Nazi regalia when he was arrested, had been advertising for sex in a flier that particularly sought Hispanic men. Holten had only recently emerged from federal prison, where he served part of a 10 month-sentence for making E-mail death threats. Holten, initially booked on suspicion of indecent exposure, is suffering from AIDS. Police said that he could be charged with a felony for failing to tell sex partners that he had the disease.

Also that month, Miner Prescott, a Cleveland neo-Nazi known as "Tsun" in his frequent postings to neo-Nazi chat rooms, admitted that he enjoyed having women urinate on him. Prescott defended the practice in a message to the neo-Nazi VNN Forum, adding that it was particularly appealing "when administered by a swanky blonde wearing something black and low-cut." Prescott also said he ran three pornographic Web sites and had sponsored Asian sex tours -- a most definite no-no in the world of all-white Aryan love, which does, after all, have its limits. He was rapidly ejected from the neo-Nazi chat rooms where he was once a favorite.